Pebble Watch App Using JavaScript

I like to code… Every time that I have some some free time in front of the computer or reading about some new language or device, comes that feeling “what nice thing I can code using this?”.

So, this time I picked my Pebble Smartwatch as a playground and decided to make something new and exciting, ansmartwatch app.

The Pebble Smartwatch was on of the pioneers on IoT and still is ahead of many devices of it’s category by providing the best recharge battery cycle, e-paper color display and common resources for everyday needs. Despite it’s discontinuity, after been bouth by Fitbit, the Pebble still is a very useful device with many interesting resources.

As the Pebble OS is not open source and can be disabled anytime by the Fitbit company, there is a very cool project called Rebble that is trying to reconstruct a similar OS for the Pebble device, based on FreeRTOS that is the same Pebble OS Base.

IoT devices usually have they’re code and apps based on C Language or some specific script language and its not different on Pebble Enviroment, it has an SDK and all that standard stuff… but there is also available a great service called CloudPebble which is a framework/compiler/interpreter to build Pebble Apps that accepts to code in javascript language, everything online, isn’t nice?

The CloudPebble is free to use, compile, emulate, generate app packages and it can also integrate with github. The better: You can code in Javascript! 😀

Well, continuing to my new and exciting thing, it’s not really easy to do something new these days, there is almost an app for everything that you can think, so I decided to make something that will be useful for me: a currency app that keeps me updated with the currencies that I want (with a nice skin). Not that there isn’t an app for that, but I didn’t like any of those, I like to have a more “cute” app with some flag icons and nice options.

The CloudPebble makes use of the PebbleKit JS which is a javascript SDK to access native properties of the native Pebble SDK. It was fine to find the documentation for almost all functions that I need, and, testing the app was also not so hard.

I also have to use the YQL Plataform (Yahoo Query Language) to get the information about the currencies. Fortunatelly the YQL is free, have a good documentation and also many good sample codes.

The Currency Exchange App code can be found at my github account and can be downloaded to start a new project on CloudPebble.